>>36737330>>36737392>>36737398>>36737425>>36737493Let's quickly talk about things I liked about ORAS. Magma and Aqua were both handled well and I enjoyed the extra detail put into their characterization. Same goes for your rival and Wally, I liked the former having more presence after Lilycove and I'm glad Wally had a more concrete arc instead of the bare bones of one like in RSE. The Secret Bases were updated nicely and the online implementation was handled very competently. I don't hate Aarune or Lisia, and I thought the postgame overworld encounters with the Gym Leaders were a nice touch to bring the world to life, even if HGSS did it better (while also adding Gym Leader remakes to a game that originally had none). There's probably something else ORAS didn't do wrong but I can't think of it.
The visuals in ORAS are trash. Not as trash as LGPE, but LGPE being worse doesn't excuse it. It doesn't feel like Hoenn was properly updated for the new hardware the way Johto was in HGSS, everything is blocky and too saturated. They also couldn't make the region work on the hardware from a technical perspective, shoving route gates everywhere breaking the flow of the game.
Music is also trash. Masuda's "expert team" of Shota Kageyama and especially Minako Adachi didn't know what they were fucking doing. Kageyama had some good original compositions in Gen 5 admittedly, but Adachi's work in SM convinces me he's just a shit musician. Most tracks are inferior to the original, with the worst being butcherings like Route 113. Little care was put in keeping the songs accurate to the original, while only a few like Mt. Chimney were different enough for me to respect as their own interpretation. It was mostly the same thing but worse.
Mirage Islands were cheap and low effort, with many island layouts copypasted and Legendary themes copied from Gen 4/5 directly. There's little fanfare to it, it feels like they just shoved all these Legendaries in for the sake of accessibility.
